Chapter Thirteen The Coming of the Civil War



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Sherman in Georgia
The summer of 1864 saw the North submerged in pessimism. The Army of the Potomac held Lee at bay but appeared powerless to defeat him. In Georgia, General Sherman inched forward against the wily Joseph E. Johnston, but when he tried a direct assault at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, he was thrown back with heavy casualties. Huge losses and the absence of decisive victory were taxing the northern will to continue the fight.
In June Lincoln had been renominated on a National Union ticket, with the staunch Tennessee Unionist Andrew Johnson, a former Democrat, as his running mate. He was under attack not only from the Democrats, who nominated George B. McClellan and came out for a policy that might almost be characterized as peace at any price, but from the Radical Republicans, many of whom had wished to dump him in favor of Secretary of the Treasury Chase.
Then, almost overnight, the atmosphere changed. On September 2 General Sherman's army fought its way into Atlanta. When the Confederates countered with an offensive northward toward Tennessee, Sherman did not follow. Instead he abandoned his communications with Chattanooga and marched unopposed through Georgia, "from Atlanta to the sea."
Sherman, like Grant, was a West Pointer who resigned his commission only to fare poorly in civilian occupations. Back in the army in 1861, he suffered a brief nervous breakdown. After recovering he fought under Grant at Shiloh and the two became close friends. "He stood by me when I was crazy," Sherman later recalled, "and I stood by him when he was drunk."
Far more completely than most military men of his generation, Sherman believed in total war-in appropriating or destroying everything that might help the enemy continue the fight. "We have devoured the land," he wrote his wife. "All the people retire before us and desolation is behind."
Another object of Sherman's march was psychological. "If the North can march an army right through the South," Sherman told General Grant, southerners will take it "as proof positive that the North can prevail." This was certainly true of Georgia's blacks who flocked to the invaders by the thousands, cheering as the soldiers put their former masters' homes to the torch.
Sherman's victories staggered the Confederacy and the anti-Lincoln forces in the North. In November the president was easily reelected, 212 electoral votes to 21. The country was determined to carry on the struggle.
At last the South's will to resist began to crack. Sherman entered Savannah on December 22, having denuded a strip of Georgia 60 miles wide. Early in January 1865 he marched northward. In February his troops captured Columbia, South Carolina. Soon thereafter they were in North Carolina, advancing relentlessly. In Virginia Grant's vise grew daily tighter, the Confederate lines thinner and more ragged.
To Appomattox Court House
On March 4 Lincoln took the presidential oath and delivered his second inaugural address. With victory sure, he spoke for tolerance, mercy, and reconstruction. "Let us judge not," he said after stating again his personal dislike of slavery, "that we be not judged." He urged all Americans to turn without malice to the task of mending the damage and to make a just and lasting peace between the sections.
Now the Confederate troops around Petersburg could no longer withstand the federal pressure. Desperately Lee tried to pull his forces back to the Richmond and Danville Railroad, but the swift wings of Grant's army enveloped him. Richmond fell on April 3. With fewer than 30,000 men to oppose Grant's 115,000, Lee recognized the futility of further resistance. On April 9 he and Grant met by prearrangement at Appomattox Court House.
It was a scene at once pathetic and inspiring. Lee was noble in defeat; Grant, despite his rough-hewn exterior, sensitive and magnanimous in victory. Acting on Lincoln's instructions, with which he was in full accord, Grant outlined his terms. All that would be required was that the Confederate soldiers lay down their arms. They could return to their homes in peace. When Lee hinted that his men would profit greatly if allowed to retain possession of their horses, Grant agreed to let them do so.
Winners, Losers, and the Future
And so the war ended. It cost the nation more than 600,000 lives, nearly as many as in all other American wars combined. The story of one of the lost thousands must stand for all-Union and Confederate. Jones Budbury, a 19-year-old Pennsylvania textile worker, enlisted at once when the war broke out. He saw action at Bull Run, in McClellans's Peninsula campaign, at Second Bull Run, at Chancellorsville, and at Gettysburg. A few months after Gettysburg he was wounded in the foot and spent some time in an army hospital. By the spring of 1864 he was a first sergeant, and his hair had turned gray.
In June he was captured and sent to Andersonville military prison, but he fell ill and the Confederates released him. In March 1865 he was back with his regiment. On April 6, three days before Lee's surrender, Jones Budbury was killed while pursuing Confederate units near Sailor's Creek, Virginia.
The war also caused enormous property losses, especially in the Confederacy. All the human and material destruction explains the hatred and resentment that the war implanted in millions of hearts.
What had been obtained at this price? Slavery was dead. Paradoxically, although the war had been fought to save the Union, after 1865 the United States was less a union of separate states than a nation. Secession had become inconceivable. In a strictly political sense, as Lincoln had predicted from the start, the northern victory heartened friends of republican government and democracy throughout the world. A better integrated society and a more technically advanced and productive economic system also resulted from the war.
The Americans of 1865 estimated the balance between cost and profit according to their individual fortunes and prejudices. Only the wisest realized that no final accounting could be made until the people had decided what to do with the fruits of victory. That the physical damage would be repaired no one could reasonably doubt; that even the loss of human resources would be restored in short order was equally apparent. But would the nation make good use of the opportunities the war had made available? What would the ex-slaves do with freedom? How would whites, northern and southern, react to emancipation? To what end would the new technology and social efficiency be directed? Would the people be able to forget the recent past and fulfill the hopes for which so many brave soldiers had given, as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, their "last full measure of devotion"?
CHAPTER 15

Reconstruction of the South
ON APRIL 5, 1865, ABRAHAM LINCOLN visited Richmond. The fallen capital lay in ruins, sections blackened by fire, but the president was able to walk the streets unmolested and almost unattended. Black people crowded around him, hailing him as a messiah. Even the whites seemed to have accepted defeat without resentment. A few days later, in Washington, Lincoln delivered an important speech on reconstruction, urging compassion and open-mindedness. Then, on April 14, while he was watching a performance of the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater, a half-mad actor, John Wilkes Booth, slipped into his box and shot him in the head with a small pistol. The next morning, without having regained consciousness, Lincoln died. With him perished the South's best hope for a mild peace. The awesome drama was still unfolding; retribution and a final humbling of the South were inevitable.
Presidential Reconstruction
Despite its bloodiness, the Civil War had caused less intersectional hatred than might have been expected. Although civilian property was often seized or destroyed, the invading armies treated the southern population with remarkable forbearance, both during the war and after Appomattox. Jefferson Davis and a few other Confederate officials spent short periods behind bars, but the only southerner executed for war crimes was Major Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville military prison.
The legal questions related to bringing the defeated states back into the Union were extremely complex. Since southerners believed that secession was legal, logic should have compelled them to argue that they were out of the Union and would thus have to be formally readmitted. Northerners should have taken the contrary position, for they had fought to prove that secession was illegal. Yet the people of both sections did just the opposite. Senator Charles Sumner and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, in 1861 uncompromising expounders of the theory that the Union was indissoluble, now insisted that the
Confederate states had "committed suicide" and should be treated like "conquered provinces." Lincoln believed the issue a "pernicious abstract on" and tried to ignore it.
The process of readmission began in 1862, when Lincoln appointed provisional governors for the parts of the South that had been occupied by federal troops. On December 8, 1863, he issued a proclamation setting forth a general policy. With the exception of high Confederate officials and a few other special groups, all southerners could reinstate themselves as United States citizens by taking a simple loyalty oath. When, in any state, a number equal to 10 percent of those voting in the 1860 election had taken this oath, they could set up a state government. Such governments had to be republican in form, recognize the "permanent freedom" of the slaves, and provide for their education. The plan, however, did not require that blacks be given the right to vote.
The "10 Percent Plan" reflected Lincoln's lack of vindictiveness and his political wisdom. e regimes established under this plan in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas bore, in the preside 's mind, the same relation to finally reconstructed states that an egg bears to a chicken. "We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching it than by smashing it," he remarked. He knew that eventually representatives of the southern states would again be sitting in Congress, and he wished to lay the groundwork for a strong Republican party in the section. Yet he realized that Congress had no intention of seating representatives from the "10 percent" states at once.
The Radicals in Congress disliked the 10 Percent Plan, partly because of its moderation and partly because it enabled Lincoln to determine Union policy toward the recaptured regions. In July 1864 they passed the Wade-Davis bill, which provided for constitutional conventions only after a majority of the voters in a southern state had taken a loyalty oath. Besides prohibiting slavery, the new state constitutions would have to repudiate Confederate debts. Lincoln disposed of the Wade-Davis bill with a pocket veto, and there matters stood when Andrew Johnson became president following the assassination.
From origins even more lowly than Lincoln's, Johnson had risen to be congressman, governor of Tennessee, and United States senator. He was able but fundamentally unsure of himself, as could be seen in his boastfulness and stubbornness. His political strength came from the poor whites and yeomen farmers of eastern Tennessee, and he was fond of extolling the common man and attacking "stuck-up aristocrats." Free homesteads, public education, absolute social equality-such were his objectives. The father of communism, Karl Marx, wrote approvingly of Johnson's "deadly hatred of the oligarchy."
Johnson was a Democrat, selected as the Republican Lincoln's running mate because of his record and his reassuring penchant for excoriating southern aristocrats. The Republicans in Congress were prepared to cooperate with him, but the president proved temperamentally incapable of working with them. Like Randolph of Roanoke, his antithesis intellectually and socially, opposition was his specialty; he soon alienated every powerful Republican in Washington.
Radical Republicans listened to Johnson's diatribes against secessionists and the great planters and assumed that he was antisouthern. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He believed in states' rights and shared most of his poor white Tennessee constituents' contempt for blacks. "Damn the negroes, I am fighting these traitorous aristocrats, their masters," he told a friend during the war. "I wish to God," he said on another occasion, "every head of a family in the United States had one slave to take the drudgery and menial service off his family."
The new president did not want to injure or humiliate all southerners. He issued an amnesty proclamation only slightly more rigorous than Lincoln's. By the time Congress convened in December, all the southern states had organized governments, ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and elected senators and representatives. Johnson promptly recommended these new governments to Congress.
Republican Radicals
Peace found the Republicans in Congress no more united than they had been during the war. A small group of "ultra" Radicals were demanding immediate civil and political equality for blacks as well as a plot of land and access to a decent education. Senator Sumner led this faction. A second group of Radicals agreed with the ultras' objectives but were prepared to accept half a loaf if necessary to win the support of less radical colleagues. Nearly all Radicals, however, drew the fine at social equality.
The moderate Republicans wanted to protect ex-slaves from exploitation and guarantee their basic rights but were unprepared to push for full political equality. A handful of Republicans sided with the Democrats in support of Johnson's approach, but all the rest insisted at least on the minimum demands of the moderates. Thus Johnsonian Reconstruction was doomed.
Johnson's proposal had no chance in Congress for reasons having little to do with black rights. The Thirteenth Amendment had the effect of increasing the representation of the southern states in Congress because it made the Three-fifths Compromise meaningless. Henceforth, ex-slaves would be counted as whole persons in apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. If Congress seated the southerners, the balance of power might swing to the Democrats.
Southern voters had provoked further northern resentment by their choice of congressmen. Georgia elected Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy, to the Senate, although he was still in a federal prison awaiting trial for treason! Several dozen men who had served in the Confederate Congress had been elected to either the House or the Senate, together with four generals and many other high officials. Understandably, these choices would sit poorly with northerners.
Finally, the so-called Black Codes enacted by the new southern governments to control former slaves alarmed the North. Although the codes were a considerable improvement over slavery, they placed formidable limitations on freedom. Blacks could not bear arms, be employed in occupations other than farming and domestic service, or leave their jobs without forfeiting back pay. The Louisiana code required them to sign labor contracts for the year during the first ten days of January. In Mississippi drunkards, vagrants, beggars, "common nightwalkers," and even persons who "misspend what they earn" and who could not pay the stiff fines assessed were to be "hired out ... at public outcry" to the white person who would take them for the shortest period in return for paying their fines. Such laws, apparently designed to get around the Thirteenth Amendment, outraged northerners.
For all these reasons the Republicans in Congress rejected Johnsonian Reconstruction. Quickly they created a joint committee on Reconstruction, headed by Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine, a moderate, to study the question of readmitting the southern states. The committee held hearings that produced much evidence of the mistreatment of blacks. The hearings strengthened the Radicals, who had been claiming all along that the South was perpetuating slavery under another name.
President Johnson's attitude speeded the swing toward the Radical position. While the hearings were in progress, Congress passed a bill expanding and extending the Freedmen's Bureau, which had been established in March 1865 to care for refugees. The bureau, a branch of the War Department, was already exercising considerable coercive and supervisory power in the South. Now Congress sought to add to its authority in order to protect the black population. Although the bill had wide support, Johnson vetoed it. Congress then passed a civil rights act that not only declared that blacks were citizens of the United States but also denied the states the power to restrict their rights to testify in court, make contracts, and hold property. In other words, it put teeth in the Thirteenth Amendment.
Once again the president refused to go along, although his veto was sure to drive more moderates into the arms of the Radicals. On April 9, 1866, Congress repassed the Civil Rights Act by a two-thirds majority, the first time in American history that a major piece of legislation became law over the veto of a president. This event marked a revolution in the history of Reconstruction. Thereafter, Congress, not President Johnson, had the upper hand.
But the Radicals encountered grave problems in fighting for their program. Northerners might object to the Black Codes and to seating "rebels" in Congress, but few believed in racial equality. Between 1865 and 1868, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Connecticut, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania all rejected bills granting blacks the vote.
The Radicals were in effect demanding not merely equal rights for freedmen but extra rights, not merely the vote but special protection of that right against the pressure that southern whites would surely apply to undermine it. This idea flew in the face of conventional American beliefs in equality before the law and individual self-reliance. Events were to show that the Radicals were correct-that what amounted to a political revolution in state federal relations was essential if blacks were to achieve real equality. But in the climate of that day their proposals encountered bitter resistance, and not only from southerners.
Thus, while the Radicals sought partisan advantage in their battle with Johnson and sometimes played on war-bred passions, they were taking large political risks in defense of genuinely held principles. One historian has aptly called them the "moral trustees" of the Civil War.
The Fourteenth Amendment
In June 1866, Congress submitted to the states a new amendment to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was a truly radical measure. Never before had newly freed slaves been granted significant political rights. It was also a milestone along the road to the centralization of political power in the United States, for it significantly reduced the power of all the states. In this sense it confirmed the great change wrought by the Civil War: the growth of a more complex, more integrated social and economic structure requiring closer national supervision. Few persons understood this aspect of the amendment at the time.
First the amendment supplied a broad definition of American citizenship: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Obviously this included blacks. Then it struck at discriminatory legislation like the Black Codes: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The next section attempted to force the southern states to permit blacks to vote. If a state denied the vote to any class of its adult male citizens, its representation was to be reduced proportionately. Under another clause, former federal officials who had served the Confederacy were barred from holding either state or federal office unless specifically pardoned by a two-thirds vote of Congress. Finally, the Confederate debt was repudiated.
Although the amendment did not specifically outlaw segregation or prevent a state from disfranchising blacks, the southern states would have none of it, and without them the necessary three-fourths majority of the states could not be obtained. President Johnson vowed to make the choice between the Fourteenth Amendment and his own policy the main issue of the 1866 congressional elections. He embarked on "a swing around the circle" to rally the public to his cause. He failed dismally. Northern women objected to the implication that black men were more fitted to vote than white women, but most northern voters were determined that blacks must have at least formal legal equality. The Republicans won better than two-thirds of the seats in both houses, together with control of all the northern state governments. Johnson emerged from the campaign discredited, the Radicals stronger and determined to have their way.
The Reconstruction Acts
Had the southern states been willing to accept the Fourteenth Amendment, coercive measures might have been avoided. Their recalcitrance and continuing indications that local authorities were persecuting blacks finally led to the passage, on March 2, 1867, of the First Reconstruction Act. This law divided the former Confederacy-exclusive of Tennessee, which had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment-into five military districts, each controlled by a major general. It gave these officers almost dictatorial power to protect the civil rights of "all persons," maintain order, and supervise the administration of justice. To rid themselves of military rule, the former states were required to adopt constitutions guaranteeing blacks the right to vote and disfranchising broad classes of ex-Confederates. If these new constitutions proved satisfactory to Congress, and if the new governments ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, their representatives would be admitted to Congress and military rule ended. Johnson's veto of the act was easily overridden.
Although drastic, the Reconstruction Act was so vague that it proved unworkable. In deference to moderate Republican views, it did not spell out the process by which the new constitutions were to be drawn up. Southern whites preferred the status quo, even under army control, to enfranchising blacks and retiring their own respected leaders. They made no effort to follow the steps laid down in the law. Congress therefore passed a second act, requiring the military authorities to register voters and supervise the election of delegates to constitutional conventions. A third act further clarified procedures.
Still white southerners resisted. The laws required that the constitutions be approved by a majority of the registered voters. Simply by staying away from the polls, whites prevented ratification in state after state. At last, in March 1868, a full year after the First Reconstruction Act was passed, Congress changed the rules again. The constitutions were to be ratified by a majority of the voters. In June 1868, Arkansas, having fulfilled the requirements, was readmitted to the Union, and by July a sufficient number of states had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to make it part of the Constitution. But it was not until July 1870 that the last southern state, Georgia, qualified to the satisfaction of Congress.
Congress Takes Charge
To carry out this program in the face of determined southern resistance required single-mindedness over a long period to an extent seldom demonstrated by an American legislature. The persistence resulted in part from the suffering and frustrations of the war years and the refusal of the South to accept the spirit of even the mild reconstruction designed by Johnson. President Johnson's stubbornness also influenced the Republicans. They became obsessed with the need to defeat him. The unsettled times and the large Republican majorities, always threatened by the possibility of a Democratic resurgence if "unreconstructed" southern congressmen were readmitted, sustained their determination.
These considerations led Republicans to attempt a kind of grand revision of the federal government, one that almost destroyed the balance between judicial, executive, and legislative power established in 1789. A series of measures passed between 1866 and 1868 increased the authority of Congress over the army, over the process of amending the Constitution, and over Cabinet members and lesser appointive officers. Finally, in a showdown caused by emotion more than by practical considerations, the Republicans attempted to remove President Johnson from office.
Johnson was a poor president and out of touch with public opinion, but he had done nothing to merit ejection from office. Though he had a low opinion of blacks, his opinion was so widely shared by whites that it is inappropriate to condemn him as a reactionary on this ground. Johnson believed that he was fighting to preserve constitutional government. He was honest and devoted to duty, and his record easily withstood the most searching examination. When Congress passed laws taking away powers granted him by the Constitution, he refused to submit.
The chief issue was the Tenure of Office Act of 1867, which prohibited the president from removing officials who had been appointed with the consent of the Senate without first obtaining Senate approval. In February 1868, Johnson "violated" this act by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who had been openly in sympathy with the Radicals for some time. The House, acting under the procedure set up in the Constitution for removing the president, promptly impeached him before the bar of the Senate, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding.
The trial was conducted in a partisan and vindictive manner. Johnson's lawyers easily established that he had removed Stanton only in an effort to prove the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the Radicals pressed the charges (11 separate articles) relentlessly. Tremendous pressure was applied to the handful of Republican senators who were unwilling to disregard the evidence.
Seven of them resisted to the end, and the Senate failed by a single vote to convict Johnson. This was probably fortunate. Had he been forced from office on such flimsy grounds, the independence of the executive might have been permanently weakened. Then the legislative branch would have become supreme.

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